The Fallacy of the Theoretical Meaning of Formative Constructs

The gap between advanced statistical approaches and epistemological discussion is certainly one of the most important problems in psychometrics to really improve psychological measures. An important issue in measurement models in social science is the debate about formative measurement models. For some years, the debate has been essentially focused on methodological issues. We aim in this short article to contribute to a critical discussion of formative models based on ontological discussion (theoretical meaning). The mainstream in psychology is based on empirical realism (see: Slaney, 2001; Maraun and, 2013). This position holds that psychological attributes are realities that we seek to characterize independently from the knower, as in physics. Clearly all the discussion about formative measurement models is, more or less consciously, based on this empirical realism epistemology. In opposition to empirical realism, a pragmatist current is emerging and poses that the ontology of psychological attributes is not independent from social praxis (Maul, 2013; Allen and Clough, 2015;Maul et al., 2016; Guyon et al., 2017;Maul andMcCrae, 2017). On the basis of this pragmatism epistemology, we argue that we should stop using formative measurement models, not only because of empirical issues but also for theoretical reasons.